Paul was doomed to be a disappointed man, and to be happy withal. When his first emotions were over he hoped his daughters would now remain at home with him. But lo, Annie was to be married as soon as John was comfortably settled, and wished in the meanwhile to continue her exertions, for they now meant to lay by on Harry's account, that he might have a little capital to begin business upon without encroaching on their father's income. And thus they toiled on and each was provided for; while Paul at length, to please his admirable wife, gave up his post, and lives comfortably on the fruits of her settlement. AN APOLOGY FOR BURNS. Burns, to be justly judged, must be estimated by a reference to the times in which he lived. If James I. and Sir Matthew Hale believed in witchcraft, and were agents in the burning of helpless, ignorant, and decrepit old women, was it not the cruel superstition and vice of their time? If Calvin condemned Servetus to the stake--aside from any personal motive, or from his own views of Christianity, "without the smile, the sweetness, or the grace"--was not the destruction of heretics equally the vice of _his_ time? If the immortal Bacon--the "wisest, greatest, _meanest_ (?) of mankind"--disgraced the judgment-seat, and stained his own great name--not, we believe, to pervert, but to expedite justice--was not bribery, which stained the ermine on infinitely _meaner_ shoulders, also the vice of _his_ time? If the great political martyrs, Lord William Russell and Algernon Sydney, accepted bribes from Louis XIV.--as shown by Mr. Macaulay, on the authority of Barillon, which authority we ourselves have consulted with astonishment and regret--was such corruption not also the vice of _their_ time, in which nearly the whole House of Commons participated? If the pious Addison was addicted to wine, and, as that vain and courtly sycophant, Horace Walpole, sneeringly asserted, "died drunk," was it not a propensity and a morbid craving, engendered by a diseased physical organization, and was not wine-bibbing pre-eminently the vice of _his_ day? In those days, when Pope or Swift penned maudlin notes to Arbuthnot, night's candles being burnt out, and jocund day standing tiptoe on the misty mountain-top, and in drunken hilarity went reeling to bed, were not such orgies, in their day, almost without shame and without reproach? When the excellent and venerable Lord-President Forbes, as shown in Mr. Burton's valuable Memoir, was kept in a state of feverish crapulence for a whole month at a time, was not dissipation emphatically the raging and besetting sin of _his_ day? But not to multiply more modern instances--and many such might be adduced--we would pause, to ask the charitable reader: Is Robert Burns to be held up to the never-dying desecration of posterity, as a man steeped in evil and impiety, because, with fiery ardor, he rushed into the polemic war then raging in